Maintaining Microsoft Windows systems with the Splunk platform
In your organization, you have many applications and services hosted on Microsoft Windows that are critical to the support of the business. Because of the reliance on these critical applications and services by workers and management, you need to monitor availability and performance to make sure that the functionality is there when needed. In order to do this, you need to search application and infrastructure logs for key indicators of failures and potential performance degradation, which are often disparate. Because it is easy to get data into the Splunk platform and then search and alert on key indicators, you are motivated to onboard data. After the data is available, you want to develop and save searches that help you achieve this type of monitoring efficiently. You can use the Splunk platform to monitor a large number of Windows system management tasks and events, such as patch management, software deployment, inventory tracking, remote access availability, and more.
Prerequisites
Technologies:
- Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud Platform
- Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Windows
Data:
- Microsoft: Windows event and update logs
How to use Splunk software for this use case
You can run many searches with the Splunk platform to manage Windows systems.
- Windows disk drive utilization nearing capacity
- Windows CPU utilization nearing capacity
- Windows memory utilization nearing capacity
- Expected Windows process not running
- Windows host stops reporting data
- Windows availability problems
- Microsoft recommended application log events
- Failed Windows updates
- All Windows events on a host
- Current state of Windows services on a host
Next steps
To maximize their benefit, the how-to articles linked in the previous section likely need to tie into existing processes at your organization or become new standard processes. These processes commonly impact success with this use case:
- Active directory administration, which is closely related to Windows maintenance
- The use of cloud services, such as Azure, to cover Windows maintenance requirements
- Integration with ticketing systems used for the service desk
- The use of any other related applications, such MS SQL Server, IIS, Exchange, and O365, which can all affect a Windows environment
Measuring impact and benefit is critical to assessing the value of IT operations. The following are example metrics that can be useful to monitor when implementing this use case:
- Availability of service: Percentage of agreed service time to down time
- Maintainability of service: Mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time between failure (MTBF)
- Additional metrics: Page load times, average response time, and operations per second
This use case is also included in the IT Essentials Learn app, which provides more information about how to implement the use case successfully in your IT maturity journey. In addition, these Splunk resources might help you understand and implement this use case: